[-empyre-] waving?

[Simon]

Gary,

'trap of existing discourses' :: thank you for the passage from 
Merleau-Ponty! But there is something strange in it, an assumption that 
we can do anything else, can ever do, other than 'writing on events.'

The alternative is that we cannot do anything else, never can do, other 
than repeat existing discourses.

The one trap is by sensibility, the other entraps by way of sentiment.

There is a lure to the sentimental, with which I think the Bryant 
article is in some ways lurid. Some of these are particular to my 
reading, at a distance.

But there is also the talking down which makes me wonder about the 
audience he intends in his readership.

As for politics, what is strange, in this event, is the power being 
wielded by governments against themselves, as if power over /economies/ 
had been repressed, and now there is this /sentiment/ on show of 
political /sympathy/, in the apologetic exercise of politics.

And this 'despite themselves' of what governments are doing, well it is 
apparent in the global strategy of self isolation, but is not this the 
pathos suffusing the communicative realm? An unmanageable hurt to our 
means of conducting politics.

What was impossible, or possible for markets, is now a demonstrable 
possibility, but against politics and its 'political events.' And all 
the more reason to be writing about them.

So I would want to raise this little doubt, rather than any great hope, 
about writerly ethics lured into the trap of sentimental moralising; 
that this may indeed be something of what Merleau-Ponty is engaging in 
autocritique with and renouncing: the luridly styled imperatives of 
political possibility--

these all start the same way:

with We must...

or follow in the same way the lures of existing responses and 
responsible discourses:

/In light of /this event/we must... /as if any of this [event] can be 
taken for given.

Best,

Simon

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